Chapter IV: Front Matter (4)

I believe that we have always had the good conceit of ourselves which we have still. We complain freely of our weather, institutions, habits, manners and customs--but that is a freedom which we arrogate to ourselves: when foreigners do the same we are merely amused, not for a moment supposing either that their charges are true or that they really mean them. Though our grousing can hardly be dated with safety before Horace Walpole, our complacency is of pretty old standing, and goes back to the time when we began to look Europe over, to say nothing of America, and incidentally grew curious about our own country. Leland, Speed, Camden, Drayton, Coryat, and finally old Thomas Fuller, between them have fairly summed up what there can have been to say for us when we had emerged from the Middle Ages and were beginning to shape for posterity; and of all those Fuller is perhaps the least known and the best worth a thought, if only because his eyes were upon what he saw rather than what he knew. The rock upon which most of our eulogists split was archæology. There Leland foundered, Speed and Camden too. Drayton had his troubles elsewhere, and plenty of them, as a poet would. Avoiding Scylla, he barged into Charybdis, where mythopoiesis lurked for him like a mermaid, and sank him so deep that he never came up again. He is very nearly unreadable; he invites ridicule and wins disgust. Over and over his bemused corpus of rime, John Selden, a most learned spider, spun webs of erudition. It is difficult to read either of them, but of the two I prefer the poet. The present Laureate puts the antiquary first. But when you come to Thomas Fuller, D.D., his _Worthies of England_, that wordy work, encumbered though it be with texts of divinity, you do at least get your teeth into something upon which to bite. He did not live to finish it, though, and the piety of his son John, “the author’s orphan,” as he described himself, erected it as a monument to his memory in 1672.

Fuller, I think, set out with the intention of belauding the human products of our realm. He cast all mankind into categories and, with them for a sieve, shook out the shires to see what he could find. To that he added matter concerning the natural and manufactured commodities of England, which forms the best reading in him to-day. One does not particularly want to know what he had to say about Sir Walter Raleigh or Cardinal Wolsey; even his opinion of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson need not detain us long, though he seems to have known personally the pair of them, and to have considered Jonson considerably the greater man. Wit was always reckoned above genius in that day. But he admits Shakespeare as a worthy of Warwickshire, accords him exactly as much space as Michael Drayton, “a pious poet,” and thinks that in our greatest man “three eminent poets may seem in some sort to be compounded”; a sufficiently qualified judgment. Those three are--“Martial, in the warlike sound of his surname”; Ovid, “the most natural and witty of all the poets”; and Plautus, “an exact comedian, yet never any scholar, as our Shakespeare (if alive) would confess himself.” He goes on, “Add to all these, that though his genius generally was jocular, and inclining him to festivity, yet he could (when so disposed) be solemn and serious.” Not extravagant praise. He does not know the date of his death, leaves it blank. And so much for Shakespeare.

It doesn’t matter; nor are his judgments of Jonson and Donne of any more moment. But it is interesting to know what the counties were doing in 1660, though, except grazing, it was little enough. In fact, what he does not say is surprising. I had certainly understood, for instance, that Newcastle was exporting coal long before that; but Fuller has no “natural commodities” to report of Northumberland. No coal in Lancashire, either. Lancashire’s products were “oates,” “allume,” and “oxen,” and her only manufacture, so declared, “fustians.” Bolton, he tells you, “is the staple place for this commodity, being brought thither” from all parts of the county. But Manchester was spinning cotton. “As for Manchester, the cottons thereof carry away the credit in our nation, and so they did an hundred and fifty years ago. For when learned Leland on the cost of King Henry the Eighth, with his guide travailed Lancashire, he called Manchester the fairest and quickest town in this county, and sure I am it has lost neither spruceness nor spirits since that time.” That is a good report, made no worse probably by the entire absence of Liverpool from the record. But there is more to come. “Other commodities made in Manchester are so small in themselves, and various in their kinds, they will fill the shop of an haberdasher of small wares. Being therefore too many for me to reckon up or remember, it will be the safest way to wrap them all together in some _Manchester-Tickin_, and to fasten them with the _pinns_, or tye them with the _tape_, and also (because sure bind sure find) to bind them about with _points_ and _laces_, all made in the same place.” That is as near to jocularity as Dr. Fuller can go. With much the same elephantine gambols used Mr. Pecksniff in a later day to entertain his daughters and pupils.

He records as proverbial of Lancashire her “fair women,” not without pointing a moral. “I believe that the God of nature having given fair complections to the women in this county art may save her _pains_ (not to say her _sinnes_) in endeavouring to better them. But let the females of this county know, that though in the Old Testament express notice be taken of the beauty of many women, _a._ Sarah, _b._ Rebekah, _c._ Rachel, _e._ Thamar, _f._ Abishaig, _g._ Esther; yet in the New Testament no mention is made at all of the fairness of any woman.” Grace, he would have you know, is all, and “soul-piercing perfection far better than skin-deep fairness.” Two other facts about Lancashire are noteworthy: “It is written upon a wall in Rome, _Ribchester_ was as rich as any town in Christendom”--that is one; and the other is that “About Wiggin and elsewhere in this county men go a-fishing with spades and matthooks.” As thus: “First they pierce the turfie ground, and under it meet with a black and deadish water, and in it small fishes do swim.” Such fish, he thinks, are likely unwholesome, and so do I; therefore I am pleased with his comfortable conclusion. “Let them be thankful to God in the first place who need not such meat to feed upon. And next them let those be thankful which have such meat to feed upon, when they need it.” Very much in the manner of Dr. Pangloss.

Fuller’s own fishing after “natural commodities” obliges him to use a small mesh. Even so he sometimes wins nothing. Cambridgeshire gives him eels, hares, saffron, and willows--a mixed bag; Essex oysters, hops and _puitts_, by which he intends peewits. Hants does better, with red deer, honey, wax, and hogs; but Wilts can only offer tobacco-pipes, and wool. Cornwall gives him diamonds! “In blackness and hardness they are far short of the Indian”--but there they are. He tops up a bumper basket down there with ambergris, garlic, pilchards, blue slate, and tin. Cornwall is easily his richest county, and next comes Cumberland, with pearls, blacklead and copper. Here are some poor ones: Dorset, “tenches,” pipe-clay, and hemp; Berks, “oakes, bark, trouts”; Bedfordshire, “barley, malt, fullers’-earth and _larks_”; slightly better are Bucks, with “beeves, sheep and tame pheasants”; Kent, “cherries, sainfoin, madder”; Hereford, “wool and salmons.” Clearly it was a day of small things. Staffordshire was making nails; Derbyshire mining lead and brewing mild ale; Somerset produced serges at Taunton; Yorkshire bred horses and made knives at Sheffield, as she did in Chaucer’s time; and that is about all that “the painted counties” were doing in 1660. For the rest, it was grazing and small-farming, large families and the beginning of religious ferment which was to work for another hundred years before it came to a head.

But old Fuller himself was what he calls somebody else, “a cordial protestant,” and does not allow us to forget it for a page at a time. He cannot speak of salt in Cheshire without remembering Lot’s wife, nor of polled cattle without head-shaking over the calf in Horeb. “The historian,” he reminds himself, “must not devour the divine in me.” He never does. The Scriptures are his real affair, as they were coming to be ours in 1660. It would be an edifying exercise, remembering that, to reckon up our gains and losses out of his meandering pages.

“MERRIE” ENGLAND

The Athenians, I believe, used to round off their bouts of high tragedy with a farce of satyrs and clowns, and the practice has survived almost to our own day. When Charles Lamb and his sister went to Drury Lane, _Pizzaro_ or _Artaxerxes_ would be followed by _Harlequin Dame Trot_, or _Harlequin Dick Whittington and his Cat_. I am not scholar enough to say of the Elizabethans that they were in the same tradition; but if they were I can perceive some intention in _Gammer Gurton’s Needle_, which has been newly edited and printed for Mr. Basil Blackwell of Oxford. Otherwise I confess myself at a loss. It is an Elizabethan or, as I think, an even earlier knockabout, in which those only who saw fun in a harlequinade would find the kind of thing that they liked. That it should have been contrived for the amusement of the Master and Fellows of Christ’s College, Cambridge, is perhaps not so wonderful as it would have been if Ben Jonson’s _Bartholomew’s Fair_ had not been revived the other day with some measure of success. And I suppose that the persons who were diverted by seeing Malvolio in the cage were very capable of being pleased with _Gammer Gurion’s Needle_. It is no worse than Shakespeare at his worst, and much better than Ben Jonson in that it is much shorter. Launcelot Gobbos, Speeds, Launces fill the stage. There are no Dogberrys, nor Dame Quickleys; no Master Shallow, no Bottom, and of course no Falstaff. But the difference is of degree, not of kind. _Gammer Gurton_ is written _de haut en bas_, as Shakespeare also wrote of rural life and manners. Its author, “Mr. S., Mr. of Art,” whoever he was--and the editor thinks that he was William Stevenson, Fellow of Christ’s in the fifteen-fifties--as heartily scorned the peasantry as William Shakespeare ever did; and I think that he knew quite as much about them. In fact, I am led to believe that the thing is not far from being a faithful picture, as nearly so, indeed, as its comic intention will allow it to be. If that is so it deserves study. When we talk, as we are apt to do, of “Merrie England,” it is as well that we should know in what England’s merriment consisted.

Gammer Gurton is mending the breeches of her man Hodge when she sees the cat at the milk-bowl. Starting up to trounce the thief, she drops her needle, her “fayre long strayght neele that was her onely treasure.” That is serious. The house is turned inside out and upside down. Tib the maid has to sift the rubbish-heap; Cock the boy spends his day on all-fours and his nose to the ground. Enters here the villain of the piece, the village half-wit, Bedlam Dick, and says that Dame Chat has the “neele.” That prepares for the great scene of the play, a slanging match between the two old women, which ends in a tooth-and-nail affair. Gammer Gurton sends for the priest; Bedlam Dick primes Dame Chat. He tells her that Hodge is going to rob her hen-roost; and later, to the priest, he suggests a hiding-place whence he can spy on Dame Chat and the “neele” in felonious use. The priest edges in; Dame Chat thinks he is the chicken-thief, and cracks his skull for him. Mighty hullabaloo: the bailiff is called in to arbitrate. Bedlam Dick gives Hodge a smack on the buttocks, and drives the needle home. That is the plot, expounded in plain words which, no doubt, were exceedingly close to the bone.

According to Christ’s College, Cambridge, the life of the English peasant in Reformation days was a purely animal process, punctuated only by foul language. Eating and drinking were the pleasures, working was the pain, contriving how to get liquor without working for it the only intellectual exercise. In _Gammer Gurton’s Needle_ there was not even love to complicate existence. Ale was the Good, and the only good.

“I cannot eate but lytle meate,
my stomacke is not good;
But sure I thinke that I can drynke
with him that weares a hood.
Thoughe I go bare, take ye no care,
I am nothinge acolde:

“I stuffe my skyn so full within
of joly good Ale and olde.
Back and syde go bare, go bare,
both foote and hand go colde:
But, belly, God send thee good ale inoughe
whether it be new or olde”:--

and so on for four clinking verses. The thing is a triumph; it sings itself. Out of its rollicking rhythm a kind of haze of romance has piled up, which select spirits like Mr. Belloc and Mr. Chesterton still see as a rosy cloud. I suppose it is all right.

But the language of those “merrie” people! There was only one injurious thing for woman to call woman: it was reflected in man’s accusation of man. If you named a woman the thing--and you always did--you named a man the thing’s son. The impact varied according to the temper of the accuser. It pricked you to madness if anger lay behind it; often it was a term of affection. Gammer Gurton so called Tib her maid, Dame Chat her girl Doll; but that was to coax them. When the beldams belaboured each other with the imputation they made the fur to fly. Exactly that impotence of expression, even in moods of malice, is observable to-day--but in towns, not in the country. I have lived twenty years in a village and never heard the taunt so much as whispered by one to another. But then nobody gets drunk out here now. Is there a holding link between ale and sterility of language? I suppose there must be.

Religion provides the only other expletives there are in _Gammer Gurton_, and that makes the date of it an interesting matter. No earlier edition appears to be known than that of 1575; but a play called _Dyccon of Bedlam_ was licensed to be printed in 1562, and one by the presumed author of _Gammer Gurton_ was acted at Christ’s College in 1553-4. However all that may fit in, there are internal evidences very much to the point. In the fifth act the bailiff is charged by the priest with Dick of Bedlam’s arrest. “In the King’s name, Master Bayly, I charge you set him fast,” he says. That might be Edward VI if the Prologue had not an allusion directly in conflict with it:

“Dame Chat her deare gossyp this needle had found;
Yet knew shee no more of this matter (alas)
Than knoeth Tom our Clarke what the Priest saith at masse.”

Is that reminiscence of old practice? Hardly that, for if the mass was then being said in English it would be quite pointless. Beyond that, the play is crammed with Catholic catchwords, all of them oaths. “Gog’s bread,” “Gog’s sydes,” “Gog’s malte”; numberless Our Ladys; “by gys” (by Jesus); finally this:

“There I will have you sweare by our dere Lady of Bullaine,
S. Dunstone, and S. Donnyke, with the three Kings of Kullaine,
That ye shall keepe it secret....”

These things point to a familiarity with Catholic usage, whichever way you take them, exceedingly interesting. The chief thing which they point out to me is that there was no religious sense in the peasantry at all. The names and symbols of worship were augmentives of conversation, but no more. They meant nothing, and implied nothing but use and wont. Catholicism expired and Calvinism did not thrive, for the same reason. Neither of them touched the heart of the peasantry, which remained what it had been throughout, innately pagan, follower (as I put it) of Saint Use, but of no other divinity. That is as far as one has been able to go. Certainly _Gammer Gurton_ will take us no further.

Dullness, bestiality, grossness: these stare you in the face. Between the lines of them you may discern the squalor and the penury of village life in Merrie England. Take this:

_Gammer_: “Come hether, Cocke; what, Cocke I say.

_Cocke_: Howe, Gammer?

_Gammer_: Goe hy thee soone, and grope behind the old brasse pan,
Ther shalt thou fynd an old shooe, wherin if thou looke well
Thou shalt fynd lyeng an inche of whyte tallow candell,
Lyght it, and brynge it tite awaye.”

If that does not bring them home to us nothing will do it--except perhaps this:

“And home she went as brag, as it had ben a bodelouce.”

ENDINGS